Data collection devices, such as scientific calculators with measurement and storage capabilities, have limited memory capacity. When measurements are collected over an extended time period, the data collection device may be left unattended. If the user sets the data collection interval (e.g. data sampling rate) to be too rapid, and/or leaves the data collection device unattended for too great a time, the capacity of the memory will be exhausted before the user instructs the data measurement device to stop collecting data. If however, the user sets the data collection interval to be too slow, the memory will have unused capacity at the end of the measurement time that could have been used to improve the quality and/or the thoroughness of the measurement data set.